We prove a lower bound ρ ≥ 9.001 for the competitive ratio of the so-called online matching problem on a line. As a consequence, the online matching problem is revealed to be strictly more difficult than the “cow problem”.

Most people approach the issue of competitiveness by attempting to define what it is or what it should be. However, it is also interesting to approach the matter from a different angle by examining what factors are not essential in establishing a country’s competitiveness on world markets. While certain factors are certainly helpful for promoting competitiveness, they nonetheless should not be ...

To better understand the complex relationship between academic researchers and funding agencies, the author interviewed 15 academic researchers regarding their views, suggestions, and difficulties in coordinating the proposal process. Data suggest that academic research funding is highly rhetorical, and that successful researchers have well-developed managerial, organizational, and communicatio...

The problem of sharing the cost of a common infrastructure among a set of strategic and cooperating players has been the subject of intensive research in recent years. However, most of these studies consider cooperative cost sharing games in an offline setting, i.e., the mechanism knows all players and their respective input data in advance. In this paper, we consider cooperative cost sharing g...

Our infrastructure touches the day-to-day life of each of our fellow citizens, and its capabilities, integrity and sustainability are crucial to the overall competitiveness and prosperity of our country. Unfortunately, the current state of U.S. infrastructure is not good: the American Society of Civil Engineers’ latest report on America’s infrastructure ranked it at a D+ — in need of $3.9 trill...

This paper studies the following online replacement problem. There is a real function f(t), called the ow rate, deened over a nite time horizon 0; T]. It is known that m f(t) M for some reals 0 m < M. At time 0 an online player starts to pay money at the rate f(0). At each time 0 < t T the player may changeover and continue paying money at the rate f(t). The complication is that each such chang...

In this paper, a multi-objective enhanced imperialist competitive algorithm (MOEICA) is presented. The main structures of the original ICA are employed while some novel approaches are also developed. Other than the non-dominated sorting and crowding distance methods which are used as the main tools for comparing and ranking solutions, an auxiliary comparison approach called fuzzy possession is ...